A few months ago I pick up an advanced copy of a novel called The Healing by Jonathan Odell. Simply put: I loved it. We’re proud to have selected The Healing for our First Editions Club for February. Jonathan visited Lemuria in 2004 for his last novel A View from Delphi which was also well-loved by Lemuria staff.

I am so excited that he’ll be here again on Wednesday, March 6 at 5:00 to talk to us about The Healing. Jonathan was gracious to write a guest blog and has shared some of the photographs, too. I’ll write no more and let Jonathan himself tell you about the story behind The Healing. -Lisa

How Black Mississippi Midwives Brought Me Home Again

by Jonathan Odell

Where I come from, you ask a man, you get the facts. You ask a woman, you get the story. As a child, I was no fool. I hung out with the women.

At family reunions, their province was in my granny’s sweating hot kitchen peeling potatoes, boiling collard greens and ham hocks, and swapping family tales, while the men sat on the porch quoting from the farm market report. Before church the women gathered in the sanctuary, catching each other up on small town gossip while the men stood out on the concrete steps, smoking cigarettes and catching each other up on college football standings.

In my own home Daddy was in charge of the checkbook, continually adding and subtracting, making sure the bottom line balanced to the penny. Mother, on the other hand, was in charge of the picture box, a tattered Keds shoebox stuffed full of family photos that spanned five generations. I’d pluck them at random and say, “Tell this one, Momma.”

When my mother narrated a snapshot she didn’t just tell of one particular day. Each photo was a vital thread in an intricate web of stories that revealed the essence of who we were, indeed, why we were.

An uncle killed in Korea, then a picture of his son — a near duplicate – with his own boy; depression-era dirt-farm poverty, then the first family automobile, shiny new; and skeletal, half-starved girls who later show up beautiful and buxom, with beauty parlor perms. There was direction to our story and it leaned toward hope. No single event was so burdensome or shameful that it could not be redeemed. The women who preserved my family’s history taught me early the truth in that old saying, “facts can explain us, but only story can save us.”

At mid-life, I was reminded of this again. I was living in Minnesota, thinking I had turned my back on my native Mississippi forever. I had become a successful, hard-nosed businessman. I had committed myself to learning the “how to” of gaining money, power and position. Knowledge was simply a means of getting more stuff. And it worked. I mastered the how to of the material world. But there is another old expression. “True sadness is getting to top of the ladder of success and realizing it is propped against the wrong wall.” The way my life was heading, all that was left to do was more of the same, only bigger and better. I came up against the paralyzing realization I was long on how, but short on why.

As my dissatisfaction grew, voices came to me at night when I lay awake in bed. Women’s voices, strong and southern, tempting me with stories, calling me back home.

Looking back, it should have been obvious what was happening. Tom Wolfe once said you can’t go home again. What he didn’t say was, you can’t totally leave either. It seemed I had escaped Mississippi in body, but not in soul.

I knew what I had to do. I shut down my business, sold my house and gave away my dog. I returned to Mississippi and sought out these women. I was ready to listen to them.

The first were members of my own family, my mother and my aunts, those women who had raised me. Seeing I was ready, they told me secrets that filled in the gaps. Some were dark and long-held and took courage to repeat.

First they told me the familiar. Then seeing that I was ready, perhaps, or simply that I cared and would not judge, they shared the secrets, the darker stories that filled the gaps: tales of violence, abuse, loss, shame, desertions. Family stories that, even though I had never heard them, shaped me nevertheless, because they shaped those who did shape me.

I learned my great-grandmother was a midwife who gave her daughter, my paternal grandmother, an abortion that killed her. She was then obliged to raise a motherless boy, my father. This explained so much about him, about me, about our struggles with trust.

On the other side of the family, my mother’s father would come home drunk from town. My grandmother would scurry my mother and all her siblings into the safety of the storm pit, a hole dug into the side of a hill. They sang gospel songs all night to drown out the sound of my grandmother’s screams as my grandfather beat her. As soon as I heard this, I understood the origin of the self-protective, suspicious nature that I shared with my mother.

I can’t overstate the impact this insight had upon me: that hidden stories, the ones of which we have no conscious knowledge, can mold our lives, determine our fates, even shape the character of a nation, without our consent. That’s when I decided I wanted to write a book that captured these stories, not just of my family, but of my people. In doing so, I had to expand the idea of who my people were.

When you open yourself up to the complex weave of story, and you diligently follow the threads, you can’t predict where you’ll be led. It’s out of your hands. And the truth is, the story of Mississippi is the story of race. You can’t get around it. Every thread leads there.

I interviewed African American women, those women who were ever present in my childhood, but whose voices I rarely heard due to the legacy of segregation.

“You have no reason to trust me,” I told them, “but I’ve got a feeling that your stories helped shape who I am.” These women, my fellow Mississippians, graciously opened up to me.

I was introduced to an older generation of people who had challenged Jim Crow and ushered in the Civil Rights era, and I learned once again that the true story was hidden from sight. I discovered that the Civil Rights movement in Mississippi was originated, supported, and led, not by the preachers and teachers written about in history books, but by women. It was the maids and fieldworkers and “Saturday night brawlers,” as Fannie Lou Hamer called them, who had nothing left to lose but their lives.

These voices, black and white, filled my first novel.

But the story didn’t end there. After completing the book, there remained a thread of story I had not followed. But the more I pulled at it, the more it promised to be a much larger story.

When I thought back over my interviews I recalled a phenomenon that had occurred repeatedly, especially among African Americans, when they spoke of a certain kind of woman. The midwife. Their voices would warm, their faces soften, and they spoke with reverence, a nearly spiritual regard. This stumped me.

In THE HEALING, I decided to focus on a subject that often arose in my interviews, but which I kept dismissing. It concerned black women healers and midwives. I first had to overcome my own prejudices. White historians and noted medical authorities treated the work of “granny women” as something to be ridiculed, an uncivilized business steeped in superstition and ignorance. Yet when the subject came up with the African American women I interviewed, I could sense they disagreed. They regarded these women with great reverence.

My breakthrough came while I was doing research in the oral history library at USM and happened to strike up a conversation with the department head, a scholar in Southern gender studies. I mentioned that I had come across many stories midwives until the 1940’s, when public health services began replacing them. I guess she noticed the dismissive tone in my voice. I may have even referred to them as granny doctors.

“You realize there was an orchestrated campaign to discredit these women, don’t you? They were seen as an obstacle by the medical establishment. They were vilified as dirty and barbaric and pushed aside.”

I told her I had not heard this, but that I really didn’t see it as a great tragedy. After all, I countered, didn’t midwives do things like bury placentas in the backyard? Nor were they professionally trained or licensed. They claimed to have been called by God. Surely the modern medical model was a better alternative.

She firmly let me know I had missed the point. “You’re talking about black women at a time when they had less authority in their lives than anyone. Many were illiterate. When one chose to be a midwife, it was a challenge to the power structure, to the established order of being subservient not only to whites, but to black men as well. The vocation took them out of the home, away from their families and out of the domestic control of their husbands, and into the homes of other men, at all times of day and night. How were they to obtain consent for such an undertaking? Black women had no voice. To do this under their own authority would be futile. But to say, ‘God told me to do it,’ was a way of taking the decision out of the hands of those who normally regulated their lives. It was not sentimental to say God chose you. It was defiant.”

As for those superstitious practices like burying the placenta or putting a knife under the bed to “cut the pain”, she challenged me to look deeper for cultural explanations. “The midwives tended not only to the physical wellbeing of the woman, but to her place in the community, and in a larger sense, to the soul of her people. For four hundred years, the message of slavery was that a black man belonged wherever a white man told him. He could be sold the next day. Or his children. During Jim Crow, with sharecropping, black families couldn’t be sure if they would be in the same place year-by-year. Imagine a midwife, who takes the placenta and buries it, emphasizing the message, or perhaps the prayer, that this child belongs in the world, in a greater web of community, with his people. That he indeed has a place. Can you imagine the power of that?”

I didn’t tell her the significance “belonging” held for me personally, but it was like a veil had lifted. I had found the book I wanted to write.

During my research I learned that during and after slavery these women tended to the soul and heart of the community. The slave master and the architects of Jim Crow derived their power by reinforcing the belief that God and scripture placed African Americans on the lowest rung of humanity. By treating their patients as deserving children of an inclusive God, the midwives subverted the message. They proved to young black girls that women could occupy powerful roles in the community. To black mothers that they were worthy of admiration and respect. These midwives were part of a resistance on whose shoulders King, Parks and Malcolm X stood.

I was privileged to interview several elderly women who had “caught” thousands of children in their communities. Over their lives, they had bonded communities together with a common sense of history, pride, and belonging. Being with them brought me closer to my own grandmother.

I remember the words of Mrs. Willie Turner, 91 at the time. She was explaining to me what an honor it had been to be a midwife. She looked out of her window.

“There are 2,063 people in this county who call me Mother,” she said. “And you know, they everyone still my child.”

Jonathan Odell, a native of Laurel, Mississippi, is the author of two novels, THE VIEW FROM DELPHI and THE HEALING, published by NAN A. TALESE/DOUBLEDAY. He lives in Minneapolis, MN. His series columns on the Legend of New Knight was awarded a First Place by Mississippi Press Awards.

I am not sure where to begin when it comes to writing about William Gay. His books do not need my praise, as they were lauded by great artists and reviewers alike long before I ever knew his name. In the past I’ve upheld and celebrated Gay’s work as some of the finest I had ever come across, but that alone won’t do anymore. I can no longer just recommend him; I must lay emphasis upon the need read to him, and more than ever now that he is gone.

Certainly his absence is painful because we won’t have a new pile of books from him. One of the tragedies of the loss of Gay is that he simply was not done. As long as there was a breath in the man there was indeed a story. I am sure of that. If we’re fortunate, his The Lost Country will finally be published posthumously, though from what I understand it may be incomplete. My hope is that The Lost Country is given the same treatment as Larry Brown’s The Miracle of Catfish—a novel that while unfinished was still published and included Brown’s notes on the story’s conclusion. Surely someone out there is at work on this as I write. Gay’s death without one more publication makes his loss all the more heartrending.

However, his loss is painful for me in another way: I never got to meet him. Of all the living authors whom I discovered and wanted to speak to, William Gay was probably number one. Of course I wanted to tell him how much I loved his sentences, how his stories were luminous webs so real that they tossed and shimmered in the sunlight, that they caught me, and caught anyone who gave them a second’s chance. He made it look so easy: “…he studied Karen’s face intently as if it were a gift that had been handed to him unexpectedly, and images of her and words she had said assailed him in a surrealistic collage so that he could feel her hand in his, a little girl’s hand, see white patent-leather shoes climbing concrete steps into a church, one foot, the other, the sun caught like something alive in her auburn hair” (“Those Deep Elm Brown’s Ferry Blues”). Stunning, right? And even more so within the context of the whole story.

I remember where I was when I read that sentence: alone in a dorm room at Mississippi College, a single lamp on beside my bed with I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down open on my chest. I kept having to lay the book down, to close my eyes and run Gay’s words over in my mind. They were like water surging over stones, moving and powerful. I had bought the book from Lemuria, before I worked here, and had discovered Gay while browsing through Barry Hannah’s books. In Barry’s section was a DVD, a conversation between him, Ron Rash, and William Gay: the latter two being authors I’d never heard of before, and had certainly never come across in the big box bookstores I’d been frequenting. Gay spoke calmly and seemed so gentle and easygoing that one struggled to understand how a story as thrilling and horrifying as “The Paperhanger” emerged from someone so meek. I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down was pivotal for me, and pulled me to the other side of the river in terms of reading and writing.

In interviews with Gay, he often says that it was Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel that made him want to be a writer. For me, Gay’s I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down did the same. I’d been reading before I came across his books, but it was his heartbreaking style, his assaultive approach, that made me stop and say, “I wish I could do this for a reader.” His fiction forced me to leave literary theory behind, to forget saying anything on behalf of an author and finally, to know that the story says it all. I sought out graduate programs in fiction writing instead of literary criticism. I stopped going to the big box stores; they no longer had anything on their shelves for me to read. I started frequenting Lemuria, and eventually they gave me a job. My life was changed.

For those not familiar with his work, Gay did a fine job of writing in a literary style while keeping the story thrilling and urgent. Anyone who frequents Lemuria’s crime and mystery section should most definitely step over into Southern Fiction and pick up one of Gay’s books. Each book provides a texture of the noir genre, while maintaining the southern literary lifeblood at its heart. William Faulkner once said that there was nothing worth writing about outside of love, money, and death, and Gay certainly knew the power these themes had over the human heart when woven through a gripping narrative. Still, literary and poetic language is never sacrificed in Gay’s work for the attempt to thrill a reader. One who sticks with Gay’s work will be rewarded with memorable and heartbreaking lines. I pray there are more of them to read.

I won’t meet William Gay. Not in person, anyway. He has, however, left his books to continue thrilling and educating me with and on storytelling. As Steve Yarbrough said on Facebook recently, his work will outlive him by many decades. I know that this is true for me, but it will only be true of others if his books continue to be bought and read and treasured like they deserve. And so, if I could, I’d tell William Gay how much he meant to me all those nights alone in my dorm room. How he helped me leave one realm of reading and thinking about literature and guided me into another, better one. I’d tell him how much his work resonated with me then and how it speaks to me now, how I saw and see the fingerprint of God in his stories. I’d tell him how much he means to me when I’m awake before the sun rises, his stack of hard work not far from my desk, as I am writing and trying to write.  -Ellis

As mentioned in a previous blog of mine, I am a lover of short stories – a personality trait that I’ve determined just cannot be helped. Every now and then my brain needs a break from the novel and I turn to a good collection of short stories.  Recently, I’ve been getting my short story fix from Dan Chaon’s newest collection of stories entitled Stay Awake. And keep me awake they do.  Chaon, author of Among the Missing (another wonderful collection of stories,) possesses the uncanny ability  to bring to life characters who embody the sadness and off-beat humor of the human condition, often simultaneously. He is a master of drawing the reader into his characters’ worlds of loneliness, anxiety or undeserved happiness and does not hesitate to insert multiple plot twists along the way.

Hence the being kept “awake” as I read this collection of stories. I am physically anxious as I read them because I know that a wonderfully grotesque plot twist is coming my way, yet I cannot stop myself from finding out what happens next. Whether reading about a woman on the brink of mid-life crisis who begins sleeping with her brain damaged ex-husband, or a couple who undergoes in vitro treatment only to have a baby with an extra head, these stories straddle the thin line between the ordinary and unfathomable in a haunting and suspenseful way.

And if you are not as enthusiastic a fan of the short story, I suggest checking out Chaon’s novels Await Your Reply or You Remind Me of Me, which are just as captivating as his stories but in novel form!

From the Nashville Scene: William Gay, the Hohenwald native who late in life earned a following as one of the most acclaimed Southern writers of recent years, was reportedly found dead last night from heart failure at his Lewis County home. He was 68. Read more here.

William Gay was a long time friend of Lemuria. Three of his novels were picked for First Editions Club: Long Home (1999), Provinces of Night (2000), and Twilight (2006).

An international bestseller, The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, was recently translated and published here in the United States so that we could all enjoy it.

An original paperback, written by  Jean-Phillipp Sendker, has a title that has caused several people to stop in their tracks while browsing the bookstore. Set in Burma, you first meet Julia who is sitting in a tiny cafe after traveling many hours to find her father. At this cafe, she is approached by a man who knows her name, why she is there and her life story. Across the world from her home of New York City, it seems unbelievable that someone knows her. Sitting at the table, in the cafe, Julia is about to learn her life story.

Julia’s father, who was most recently a New York City lawyer, has vanished. Julia comes across a love letter from her father to a lady named Mi Mi. This letter is what leads Julia to the little village in Burma. The man who found  her in the cafe, a stranger, soon unravels the story of Tin Tin (Julia’s father) and Mi Mi.

What Julia knows of her father is this: he met and married her mother. Together they have Julia and her sister. Prior to all that, she learns that her father, as a young boy, was blind. He met a girl Mi Mi, who was unable to walk but fell in love with her because he was drawn to her.  Because he could not see, he was not drawn to her because of the way she looked;  it was because he could so clearly hear her heartbeat.

The love story between these two is unbelievable. Tin Tin would carry Mi Mi around on his back. She would be his eyes. She would direct him as he walked, described what he could not see and cared for him more than anyone else had. Tin Tin became Mi Mi’s feet. He was her form of transportation. He carried her on his back-every step of the way. Together these two saw the world unlike anyone else ever had.

You know the love story between these two ended in one way or another. After all, Julia’s father somehow ended up in New York City with sight, working as a lawyer and married to her mother.

While in Burma, Julia tracks her father down and finds out more on his reunion with Mi Mi. That, in itself, is worth the read.  -Quinn